Since Black (1976), the source of the stock price volatility smirk has remained a controversy. The volatility smirk is a side effect of agency conflict. An important distinction is that the smirk occurs in the optimum, even after agency conflict has been resolved. The slope of the smirk is found...

Corporate control has added value for an investor since it gives degrees of freedom about the use of assets, sources of finance, salaries, etc. On the other hand, real options create value through the flexibility associated to the ability to react to some relevant uncertainty. The process of...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the influence of uncertainty on the value of real options while allowing for a possible change in the value of the underlying asset. We show that the proposition of a strictly positive influence of uncertainty does not hold, if the value of the underlying...

We use a compound option-based structural credit risk model to infer a term structure of banking crisis risk from market data on bank stocks in daily frequency. Considering debt service payments with different maturities this term structure assigns a separate estimator for short- and long-term...

In this article we analyse the effects of different regulatory schemes (price cap and profit sharing) on a firm's investment of endogenous size. Using a real option approach in continuous time, we show that profit sharing does not affect a firm's start-up decision relative to a pure price cap...

This paper examines the effect of competition on the irreversible investment decisions under uncertainty as a generalization of the "real option" approach. We examine this issue with reference to an industry where each firm has only one investment opportunity which is completely irreversible and...

This paper shows that the presence of conditional staging in R&D (Research & Development) has a critical impact on portfolio risk, and changes diversification arguments when a portfolio is constructed. When R&D projects exhibit option-like characteristics, correlation between projects plays a...

We study to what extent firms spread out their debt maturity dates across time, which we call granularity of corporate debt. We consider the role of debt granularity using a simple model in which a firm's inability to roll over expiring debt causes inefficiencies, such as costly asset sales or...

We investigate American options in a multiple prior setting of continuous time and determine optimal exercise strategies form the perspective of an ambiguity averse buyer. The multiple prior setting relaxes the presumption of a known distribution of the stock price process and captures the idea...

We investigate financial markets under model risk caused by uncertain volatilities. For this purpose we consider a financial market that features volatility uncertainty. To have a mathematical consistent framework we use the notion of G-expectation and its corresponding G-Brownian motion...